Silicon Valley Ruined Work Culture

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Offices used to be gulags, but at least they had a clear purpose. You wouldn’t hang out in a cubicle farm, let alone spend time there on the weekends. Then companies like Google came along and reinvented the rat race into something with purpose and, along the way, confused work with the rest of life. Now, your coworkers are supposed to feel like a family. Hierarchies have been flattened, conventional job titles replaced by ones like “wizard” and “ninja.” The vacation days are unlimited (not that you’d ever take them). And forget about work-life balance. It’s all about work-life integration. Why else would the office have on-site acupuncture, nap pods, and free dinner after 7 pm?

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Arielle Pardes — Wired

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Silicon Valley’s Crisis of Conscience

Esalen is the place.

Esalen is one such place. Another is 1440 Multiversity, a sleek campus in Santa Cruz County—the boutique hotel to Esalen’s summer camp. Spirit Rock, a meditation center in Marin County, recently held a gathering to discuss “technology as an existential threat to mindfulness.” There are invitation-only dinners, private cuddle parties, conferences called Responsible Tech and Wisdom 2.0. “There’s a lot of debate about what to call it,” Paula Goldman, who runs a new department at the software company Salesforce called the Office of Ethical and Humane Use, said. “Ethical tech? Responsible tech?” If the name is one source of confusion, the substance is another. Is it a movement, or the stirrings of what might become a movement? Is it evidence of canny P.R., or of deep introspection?

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Andrew Marantz — The New Yorker

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How Silicon Valley Made Work More Stressful

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Lyons: This is a very cynical take, but all of that superficial stuff was really this bright, shiny object that they dangled in front of employees, while on the side they were sweeping away a lot of the more fundamental stuff like job security, the chance to get promotions, the chance to develop your career inside an organization at the very lowest level, to have health benefits. It’s amazing how many people in their 20s I talked to who said the one thing they really want and they’ve never had is a job with health insurance.

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Knowledge@Wharton

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This Is How Sexism Works in Silicon Valley

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Ellen Pao shares in detail her side of the story showing how sexism works in Silicon Valley.

In retrospect, the most painful part of the trial was being cross-examined by Kleiner’s lawyer. At one point, she claimed I’d never invested in a woman’s company. “You’ve never done anything for women, have you?” she said snidely. I’d been instructed by my lawyers not to respond to comments like that, because it might open me up to more criticism — jurors could find me difficult or aggressive, the very things Kleiner was trying so hard to portray me as in court. I ended up coming across as distant, even a bit robotic, as I tried to keep my answers noncombative. But it hurt to leave that one unchallenged. It was patently false. At Kleiner, I helped drive investments in six women founders. A few months after I was fired by Kleiner, I invested in ten companies with my own money; five had women CEOs. But I didn’t say any of that. I just sat there.

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Ellen Pao — The Cut

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I Got Scammed By A Silicon Valley Startup

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Today’s needull is a horrible experience of a Silicon Valley startup employee. This is not to generalize all the Silicon Valley startups. There will always be people on the fringes who will do such unethical activities. I am sharing this because it is a compelling read and some parts of it might reflect what we might have faced.

Red flag #4: If you’re a manager and your direct report is hired before you without your engagement, they may not be a good fit and compete for your job.

We had 8 young Chinese employees on H-1B visas with us as developers, limited in experience but eager to please and learn. They end up being the ones to suffer the most. We also had three new business development team members. One of them befriended me quickly (I’ll call him Bruce) and eventually told me that he and the other two were poached from another startup across the hallway by our CEO who wanted a group of friends. Essentially, they were hired bros with ambiguous titles. I quickly leaned on Bruce as a friend (less cautiously than usual) because he seemed like a genuine person who was interested in helping me adjust to the new area.

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Penny Kim — Medium

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This is Your Life in Silicon Valley

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Came across this really cool satire on life in Silicon Valley. The takeaway for me was that when we see the other side we always find the grass greener. We somehow block all the negatives and see only all the positive things. Life anywhere would have its pluses and minuses and Silicon Valley is no exception.

You decide to share an article about Brexit from “The Atlantic”, which will somehow shed light to all your friends as to why it happened. The article is 1,000 words long — you only read half of it, but that’s good enough. It captures all the arguments you’ve been wanting to make for the past two months to your friends. Will this be the Facebook post that finally spurns your friends into action? You realize your Facebook friends all agree with your political views and social views already.

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Sunil Rajaraman — Medium

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